When the 90’s house music French duo Daft Punk announced a new album, the blog-o-sphere was tilted on its side. Releasing teaser posters, commercials featuring 30 seconds or less of new music and a sound-byte a day to the music press, you realize that whoever does Daft Punk’s publicity should give up their day job and run for political office. They took a non-event and turned it into a media blitz. The press as well as the fans seemingly could not get enough and for over 3 months, very thin news with hardly any meat about Daft Punk clogged up everyone’s news feeds. The funny thing is, I actually like Daft Punk, but as the weeks rolled on, I got so fed up about hearing about them, I started rooting for them to fail just so the press and all the fans would once and for all shut the fuck up about them! The daily news on this band made me realize that while I’ve bought their albums consistently over the years (and there aren’t many), I like very few of their songs. Sure their debut track “Da Funk” made me shake my ass on a dance floor many times, but upon further inspection, it’s really a song featuring one minute of different music looped together over and over for 6 minutes! They pulled off the same trick for their next big single “Around The World” too. Take a serious listen if you think I am hating for the sake of hatred.

The music industry has changed a lot since Daft Punk first came on the scene and in 2013 the record labels leak the album in full and then are forced to “stream it” ahead of its release date. This gives the label the perfect excuse to account for dubious sales numbers by blaming the bootleggers on an album’s failure instead of the fact that many times, the biggest failure of the record is the record itself! Also, don’t these labels wonder that if an album is under lock and key and somehow it gets out, why don’t they question the hiring managers of these departments. There’s seemingly no accountability when you can loudly shout out in the press “we’ve been robbed!” Why nobody speaks about this very obvious fact is beyond my comprehension, so if you think of the last few years of blockbuster albums and how they’ve all followed this pattern, you can thank me later for being the true voice of a generation. You certainly can’t rely on press release regurgitating blogs because they are never going to jeopardize losing their perks by speaking the truth. Since I do things renegade style and 99 times out of 100 get better access on my own than going through the “proper channels,” the time has come to break the silence! So spread the word!!!!

Back to Daft Punk. I’ve given their new album “Random Access Memories” a couple of spins and I could not be any more underwhelmed with the record. However, I’ve noted that it follows the same pattern as their other albums – 2 or 3 decent tracks with a whole lot of filler. Obviously the best tracks are the ones that feature Nile Rodgers producing. The man knows how to craft a hook and has done so successfully for over 30 years. The tracks he is featured on should actually be called Nile Rodgers tracks featuring Daft Punk and not the other way around, but we can save that for another time. The vocoder is ever present in many of the songs ruining great cameo appearances by Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and the majority of the album features completely forgettable songs. The album hasn’t even seen the official release date and I am already at the point where if I never hear any of the album again, you will not see one tear fall from my eye.

The hype machine has already labeled this album a “game changer,” and for those who really believe that, I urge you to get a better education in dance music because if you do, you will find yourself (probably to your dissatisfaction) agreeing with me 100%. I didn’t come here to make you hate the Daft Punk record. I hope that you like it. I want you to stop allowing the media to force feed you what you “should” like because I am starting to find that with so many big time releases, people only like them because they read somewhere that they should. 6 months, or hell, in the one second attention span generation we live in, 2 weeks from now, I am quite sure once the buzz has died down from this record, your enjoyment of it will have as well. Think for yourself!!!